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Cosmology Code’s Performance Characteristics Generates Paper

September 1, 2004

When the team from LBNL’s CRD and NERSC Divisions spent a week conducting performance evaluations of Japan’s Earth Simulator in late 2003, one of the five codes they intended to run did not scale well enough to be used.

According to team leader Lenny Oliker, the application MADCAP (the Microwave Anisotropy Dataset Computational Analysis Package), a parallel implementation of cosmic microwave bacground map-making and power spectrum estimation algorithms, has been tuned since then and the group is returning to Japan in October 2004 to try again. MADCAP’s performance was hampered by the lack of a fast global file system on the ES, since the code has high I/O requirements.

The results of the MADCAP evaluation runs are the basis for the paper “Performance Characteristics of a Cosmology Package on Leading HPC Architectures,” which will be presented at HiPC 2004, the eleventh International Conference on HPC to be held in Bangalore, India, in December. The paper is available at <http://crd.lbl.gov/~oliker/papers/HIPC04.pdf>.


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High performance computing plays a critical role in scientific discovery. Researchers increasingly rely on advances in computer science, mathematics, computational science, data science, and large-scale computing and networking to increase our understanding of ourselves, our planet, and our universe. Berkeley Lab’s Computing Sciences Area researches, develops, and deploys new foundations, tools, and technologies to meet these needs and to advance research across a broad range of scientific disciplines.